


Bite the bullet

by regsregis



Series: Breaking your habits [1]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, M/M, its tagged as major character death but we all know it kinda isn't, its uhh complicated, rhack is also only implied and mostly one sided and only here because of how the story will turn out
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 10:09:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11250963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regsregis/pseuds/regsregis
Summary: It's a prelude to the whole series, written after the story has mostly run its course so uhh, gonna be fun. I'm bitter i did not come up with it prior to writing the whole series and im still debating if it shouldn't be a standalone thing. Also, still debating smut in this thing, again, because of how things have turned out further down the road, oh well we'll see





	Bite the bullet

The perpetual ambient light of the facility irritates his sight and Rhys rubs the heels of his hands against his eye sockets with a sigh. It feels as if the omnipresent pandoran sand found its way under his eyelids, leaving his eyes perpetually red rimmed and dry. His last meal sticks to his stomach, processed food, completely flat in its taste, yet another thing to add to his misery. And the list just goes on and on.

A powered down loader bot. ‘A’, not ‘the’ and he rolls over on the hard bed in the staff quarters. Dumb thing has barely survived the crash but bravely helped him get out of the wreckage of the space station, carrying the exhausted man to the only place he could think of that would offer some form of protection. Dumb thing then gave under the barrage of bullets rained down by the hostile security bots before Rhys finished hooking up his severed arm to the surveillance systems to force the override code. 

_Better it than him. Better to have those codes than not. Better to avoid thinking to whom they belonged previously._

One cybernetic arm with its damaged circuitry but data banks still functioning and if the scavenged tools and spare parts prove to be workable, it will soon be operational again. Not like he has any means of re-attaching it just yet but all in due time. Preferably after the bruises on his throat are long healed.

One run-down facility, stocked with enough canned food to last till the judgement day although Rhys might have already started judging old Atlas requisition officers for their poor tastes. Regardless, it keeps him alive and that’s kinder than anything he has experience on this shit hole of a planet.

Seven empty data drives that are incompatible with his hardware but there are ways to fix that, a work around he has just enough skill to figure out. It’s just that he’s not sure if he should. He’s also not sure if he’ll resist the temptation of -not- doing it regardless.

One glob of protective gel rolled into a tight ball that he has eventually pried from his eye socket and he’s not entirely sure if the holes in his chest and face could feel more empty.

One small piece of tech the gel was intended to protect.

That and a slip of paper crumpled in the pocket of his vest, are all that he has to his name, if his name means anything anymore. 

-II-

Two months later and Old Haven feels almost like home, bots buzzing about and the food doesn’t taste as bad even if it’s repetitive. Repetitive or not, Rhys licks the spork clean and tosses the empty can onto the ever growing pile in the corner of the room. There is a computer with it’s chassis removed, cables billowing from its insides and stretching across the room, only one of them plugged in into an outlet. 

It’s quiet and forlorn here and Rhys has taken to trying to fill the silence with the sound of his own voice, chatting with the unresponsive bots and other pieces of equipment. The only one he hopes will never respond is the lonely echo-eye. It’s the one most likely to answer the constant chatter of his never ending complains but Rhys refuses to meditate on that too hard. 

He has blisters on his fingers when an errant spark has made his cybernetic arm jolt suddenly, the tip of the soldering iron catching against the skin but he doesn’t really mind. He doesn’t mind many things he used to, the once pristine example of Hyperion advancement in prosthetics now patched up with hammered and dented aluminium from the empty cans. His once perfectly groomed hair in a complete disarray, quickly turning into an even worse mess when he pushes it out of his eyes with grease stricken fingers. At the very least a thin band secured around his head to keep the eyepatch in place keeps most of it out of his face. The last of the open wires makes connection, glued together with the raw endings once linked to his brain and effectively bypassing the incompatible plugs and ports between Atlas and Hyperion technology. 

Today however, he needs to look his best, right now giving finishing touches to the efforts of his work, soldering the last couple of wires and the scent of resin settles over him in a comfortable blanket of distant memories of a pine forest he remembers from his childhood.

He hums a cheerless melody, nails scratching against the stubble on his chin as he runs over every point of the plan he has set in motion no long after taking residence here. A lone king in his empty castle, too consumed by his obsession, something that he hopes to remedy soon.

There are plenty spare articles of clothing, and to Rhys’ surprise, some of them even fit him. Some even match and he settles for a button up and a jacket in, now, all too familiar dark greys and oranges of the bankrupt company. His company even though right now it’s just him and some bots. He takes his time bringing his face to some kind of order, soft plink of water when he dips the razor in the sink to wash the shaving cream out, the only sound in the cramped bathroom. There is still time before his program finishes duplicating and redistributing the code and just as it goes about sorting every line into its respective drive, he sorts out his hair. Doesn’t sort himself out, even though these days he has most of the facility in check. With a long winded sigh, Rhys thinks there isn’t a piece of tech advanced enough to do that for him despite there clearly -is- one, exceptional enough to have put him in this sorry state.

-II-

Rhys spreads out all seven drives on the table, their content an identical copy of the malicious string of commands that tended to easily outsmart and outmaneuver the limitations of human brain, and he randomly picks one of them. It burns in his hand, not literally even though it's still warmed up from being plugged into the machine, its components overclocking to compensate for the much needed extra processing power, but with the charged decision he’s making here and anticipation. It burns somewhere at the back of his mind too, a white hot void that he wasn’t quite able to sooth till, hopefully, this day.

There is no hesitation when he plugs it into the device specifically prepared for this sole purpose, its connection to the echo net severed long ago, the detached blue lense serving as its only portal into the real world and it’s as crippled as is Rhys. The irony makes him snort as he plops himself down on a chair in front of it.

The long, high pitched shriek bursting through the speakers has him bolting towards the volume control with a cringe. He waits, patiently, for the blue specter to pull his pixels together and materialize himself fully on the screen, old echo-eye blinking once, twice before video feed starts streaming in.

“Hello Jack…” 

Turning the volume back up, he catches the tail end of a tirade mostly made of random curses and threats loosely strung together, eventually capped with a hissed ‘what the fuck Rhysie.’

He has no answer to that, the question having been murmured and bounced off against the cool surface of the bathroom mirror way too many times in recent weeks. The only reply is a cruel smirk playing on his chapped lips and not for the first time, Rhys wonders how much of the AI still stayed in his brain, if some stray line of code didn’t end up stuck somewhere in his skull, perhaps with a splinter of the cybernetics he might have missed. He knows it's unreasonable but the thrill shooting up his spine at the sight of a wild expression on the AI’s face is something he refuses to acknowledge as a thing that has always been there. 

“Have you got anything to say to me?” Whatever it might be, Rhys has little interest in it, partly due to his self-preservation instincts. It’s a dangerous game he’s playing here, Handsome Jack having always been known for his way with words and Rhys knows first hand how easily they could mess with his head. But mostly, he’s just too angry to hear the AI out. So he waits for Jack to work himself into a state when there again are more threats than actually coherent words. Once there is nothing else but curses spat at him, his memories drifting back to the night Helios fell, Rhys brings his hands to the keyboard, hesitating for the very first time and Jack picks up on it like a hound on a trace of blood.

“What is it fucker, having second thoughts?” No he isn’t and Rhys is strangely taken aback when he realizes that perhaps he should, fingers teasing along the edges of old school buttons before he finally keys in the command.

It takes the AI a moment to realize what’s going on, the lines beginning to dissolve painstakingly slow and it’s going to take a longer while for the antivirus to delete the perceived threat.

Jack screams and Rhys doesn’t turn the volume down this time.

When Handsome Jack starts begging, Rhys gets a little bit hot under the collar, unmoving eye fixed on the monitor where the thrashing software gradually starts glitching out of existence.

It’s quiet and lonely again but he shoves the remaining drives into a drawer and finally sleeps a little bit easier.

**Author's Note:**

> sooo i know i might have bitten more than i can chew but the idea just wouldn't fucking leave me so ahh, feedback is super appreciated.  
> i'm not best suited for writing introspective character studies, i prefer writing action so ahh, might be weird here and there.  
> lemme know if there;s anything that's not clear!


End file.
